The Web and all that Jazz

- You are an inventor. You've invented a solar-powered microwave oven, an engine that runs on dead bugs, and a laser-powered weapon to kill mosquitoes. Someone comes to you and says:

"Hey inventor, I need a drone that will pick up mice (but not other animals), locate my ex-girlfriend and drop them on her head. Give me a budget and a time estimate."

That pretty much sums it up for me

Often times in software engineering, you're doing something slightly new, so you don't know exactly how long these things will take. Add up a lot of little tasks, and the margin for error in estimate is going to be bigger the further out you try to plan.

This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 in the U.S.) from box-office revenue. But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from? From sources that the studios at one time claimed would put them out of business: Pay-per view TV, cable and satellite channels, video rentals, DVD sales, online subscriptions and digital downloads.

The music and movie business has been consistently wrong in its claims that new platforms and channels would be the end of its businesses. In each case, the new technology produced a new market far larger than the impact it had on the existing market.

• 1920's - the record business complained about radio. The argument was because radio is free, you can't compete with free. No one was ever going to buy music again.
• 1940's - movie studios had to divest their distribution channel - they owned over 50% of the movie theaters in the U.S. "It's all over," complained the studios. In fact, the number of screens went from 17,000 in 1948 to 38,000 today.
• 1950's - broadcast television was free; the threat was cable television. Studios argued that their free TV content couldn't compete with paid.
• 1970's - Video Cassette Recorders (VCR's) were going to be the end of the movie business. The movie businesses and its lobbying arm MPAA fought it with "end of the world" hyperbole. The reality? After the VCR was introduced, studio revenues took off like a rocket.  With a new channel of distribution, home movie rentals surpassed movie theater tickets.
• 1998 - the MPAA got congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), making it illegal for you to make a digital copy of a DVD that you actually purchased.
• 2000 - Digital Video Recorders (DVR) like TiVo allowing consumer to skip commercials was going to be the end of the TV business. DVR's reignite interest in TV.
• 2006 - broadcasters sued Cablevision (and lost) to prevent the launch of a cloud-based DVR to its customers.
• Today it's the Internet that's going to put the studios out of business. Sound familiar?

Why was the movie industry consistently wrong? And why do they continue to fight new technology?

I think being in technology, we take innovation-as-a-good-thing for granted. Everyone else in other slower moving industries probably see their business models as granting privilege and right established so long ago, that no one really cares where they come from or how they came to be--and especially whether the world, economy, and landscape is as it was back then.

Or maybe they do, and the MPAA and RIAA willfully ignore how new technologies have helped them make money in the past. You'd think that with the pace of new platforms to be able to make them money on, they're remember that and find ways to capitalize on it.

But I remember Dalton Calwell puts it: "I don't envy being [in their position because] they're dealing with economic realities, and there aren't a lot of options."

I suspect this is partially because they don't innovate on their own, and are usually blindsided by what comes out of Silicon Valley. Movie and Music industries really need to learn how to innovate on their own so they don't get blindsided so often, time after time. And it may be that they need to become technology companies, according to the Marc Andressen's insight that Software is Eating the World.

Ironically, the six major movie studios have a great technology lab in Silicon Valley with projects in streaming rights, Video On Demand, Ultraviolet, etc. But lacking the support from the studio CEOs or boards, the lab languishes in the backwaters of the studios' strategy.

That's really a pity. 

The Law requires that all companies and individuals who are registered as entrepreneurs in Belarus use only domestic Internet domains for providing online services, conducting sales, or exchanging email messages. It appears that business requests from Belarus cannot be served over the Internet if the service provider is using online services located outside of the country. The tax authorities, together with the police and secret police, are authorized to initiate, investigate, and prosecute such violations. (Id.)

Additionally, the Law states that the owners and administrators of Internet cafés or other places that offer access to the Internet might be found guilty of violating this Law and fined and their businesses might be closed if users of Internet services provided by these places are found visiting websites located outside of Belarus and if such behavior of the clients was not properly identified, recorded, and reported to the authorities. The Law states that this provision may apply to private individuals if they allow other persons to use their home computers for browsing the Internet. (Id.)

When I read this at first, I thought it was a democratic nation that was restricting internet access of its citizens. I had no idea Belarus is one of the last authoritative regimes. That explains a bit more, as anything that can be used to challenge your power will be tried to shut down. However, even democratic societies are restricting internet access for its citizens, like Australia most notably.

By looking at the changes in linguistic style that occur when people make the transition from non-admin to admin roles, Kleinberg and co cleverly show that the pattern of linguistic co-ordination changes too. Admins become less likely to co-ordinate with others. At the same time, lower ranking individuals become more likely to co-ordinate with admins.

A similar effect also occurs in the Supreme Court (where power differences are more obvious in any case).

Curiously, people seem entirely unware that they are doing this. "If you are communicating with someone who uses a lot of articles — or prepositions, orpersonal pronouns — then you will tend to increase your usage of these types of words as well, even if you don't consciously realize it," say Kleinberg and co.

If you can measure actual influence, there will be an entire industry and market that grows up around trying to hack it and influence it. It'll amplify the positive feedback loop, where the influential will become even more influential, since we'll look to the ranking to help us decide who to listen to.

This would also affect social networks, especially those like Linkedin, where ladder climbers and recruiters try to find influential people. I can imagine it would help Facebook do rankings on its news feed.

However, those are just retroactively applying a new technique to existing products. The question we should be asking is, what other types of things does this technology allow?

Off the top of my head, you can provide real-time feedback during a conversation or chat of how you're being perceived. Advertising would find it interesting on the assumption that more influential people can get others to buy. The other thing you can do is see if the measure of power correlates with virality.

That is why it is critical for today’s 3D printing community, tucked away in garages, hackerspaces, and labs, to keep a vigilant eye on these policy debates as they grow. There will be a time when impacted legacy industries demand some sort of DMCA for 3D printing. If the 3D printing community waits until that day to organize, it will be too late. Instead, the community must work to educate policy makers and the public about the benefits of widespread access. That way, when legacy industries portray 3D printing as a hobby for pirates and scofflaws, their claims will fall on ears too wise to destroy the new new thing.

I know there's open source hardware, but what does the equivalent of open source objects look like?

The person on the other end seemed startled that I had actually answered. It was someone from GoDaddy's abuse department, who informed me that they were "turning off" weebly.com due to a complaint.

"WHAT?" I said frantically into the phone. He explained that they had received a complaint about the content of a site, and that they were removing the DNS entries for weebly.com because of it. I asked him if they had contacted us previously -- he responded that they hadn't.

The site in question featured a bad review of a local business, and that business had complained. Why on earth would a domain registrar take it upon themselves to police content?

SOPA is definitely a bad idea if I've ever heard of one.

The problem in his view is that many of the talented engineers and product designers who are now starting their own companies could have a bigger impact at places like Facebook, and they in turn will have a hard time attracting the best talent because those people can get funded to start their own projects as well.

It’s gotten so bad that, says Parker, “Now institutionally-backed venture funds are backing other venture funds in order to stay close to the dealflow.” (Hmm, sounds familiar).

“And it will end very badly,” pipes in VC Jim Breyer, who is also onstage with Parker.

Parker suggests that one reason it will end badly is because the Internet industry will ultimately consolidate just like the PC industry did in the 1980s and 1990s.

This is what innovation looks like. There are periods of great diversity and flowering, and there are periods of consolidation and maturation. When we're in one period, there's always people deriding it for the other. Everyone says they want innovation as a lover, but no one likes to deal with her moods.

A major problem that I have with the new interface is that Gmail has gone from text-based buttons to an icon-only design. Lots of desktop applications offer the choice between text, icons or text and icons. Gmail, however, seems to have decided that we're all better off with just icons. But we're not.

Not only does this make the interface less usable, but it also takes up more vertical space than the original design. The icons really don't do the job anyway. Does an octagon with an exclamation point really say "spam" to you?

Funny, when I looked at the row of buttons, I thought the box with the arrow was the most cryptic. But I knew the one on the right was a trash can, so that must be delete. And oddly enough, when I saw the stop sign with the "!", I knew it was spam, because the keyboard shortcut for spam is "!". So by process of elimination and how the buttons are grouped, the box with the arrow must be archive.

The gmail team seems to have taken the advice of the post, as all the icons are now text.

I'm admittedly bad at knowing when interfaces are confusing to others, because I don't mind clicking on things to see what they do, and doing a bit of thinking to figure something out. The strengths that I have as an engineer makes it a weakness when I consider interface design.

I have to remember that most people do not want to think, do not want to click unless they're sure what it does.

Perhaps the latter can be fixed by software. Undo is not readily supported because it's usually not a Minimum viable product to spend the extra effort to do so. It could also be that as programmers, the underlying way we store our data in databases don't allow for easy undo implementation--that's to say, we have to think about it at all.

Perhaps databases should support undo natively. Or the command pattern should be more familiar to web developers.

Another problem is that while there's a noun project, categorizing nouns and their associated icons, what we really need is a VERB PROJECT. Most web applications have actions associated with the buttons. But often times, there's no good universal icon for a particular action. What's the icon for "archive", "repost", "render"? There are none, and we end up having to invent one on the fly with our presuppositions like mine about spam above

Where are the trees is an experiment trying to create a Tilt-Shift effect on Text using CSS3 only.
Note: You also can click on the text and edit it.
Background source photo by karinga. Looks best in Safari.

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I've decided to stop posting links just to FB. It just gets stuck in there, esp if it's just links. The thing is, usually, I have someone in mind when I'm sharing this sort of thing. I guess I'll just have to make it a two step process, in order to get back into blogging.